We walk through life wondering what our future will be and how we will affect ourselves and others. We try to control our fears and insecurities and connect to fantasy work and use it to help us overcome everyday problems. In “The Fault in Our Stars,” John Green uses symbols to show how people feel the need to control our fears, how we influence the future of others, and how we try to relate to works of fiction. The cigarettes that Augustus puts in his mouth but does not represent the light, our attempts to control and face the things we fear. When he tells Hazel, "It's a metaphor, you see: you put the killing object right between your teeth, but you don't give it the power to kill." cancer. Over the course of the novel, cigarettes are shown to have a greater significance than initially stated. He reaches out to them whenever he feels insecure or feels he needs to control his fears. This shows how we feel like we need to control our fears and insecurities. Agustus tries to go buy a pack of cigarettes but something goes wrong, and when Hazel comes to help him he says "I wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes", he muttered. ““I lost my backpack. Or they took it away from me, I don't know, they said they would get me another one, but I wanted... . . do it alone. Do a little thing yourself. (68)” This shows that he is trying to regain control but at this point he has already lost it. Another symbol that John Green uses to show how we will affect the people around us is the grenade. Hazel constantly deals with it by saying, “I'm like. As. I'm like a grenade, mom. I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to explode and I'd like to minimize casualties, okay?" (31). Which shows... middle of paper... and let's make sure that when we die, we leave it to our families positive memories of us so that we can move forward. When John Green uses symbols to show our need to control our fears and insecurities, as we wonder how we will influence the future of people around us and how we connect to the imaginary work to help us overcome everyday problems. We try to control our insecurities by coming up with creative ways like Augustus does by putting an unlit cigarette in his mouth. We also try to control how we will affect other people's lives after our death or even just that come on. We try to distance ourselves from others when we know bad times are coming, like Hazel starting to distance herself from her family when her cancer starts to get worse. . We try to escape our lives and even compare our lives to imaginary ones, so that we can better understand our lives and our effects on others.